Stewart Copeland on how film composing makes you a better musician

“I never got the gift of piano-tude,” jokes Police drummer
Stewart Copeland during a recent trip to New York City. “I sit at a
piano keyboard all day, every day, entering notes, and I can barely play
‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”

That may be a bit modest, but even if Copeland isn’t
poised for a career as a concert pianist, his three-decade arc as a
sought-after composer has never looked brighter. From his scores to
films like Rumble Fish, Talk Radio, and Wall Street, to
his forays into ballet, opera, and symphonic works, the legendary rocker
continues to prove that he’s just as potent away from the drum kit as
he is behind it.

Now with the debut of his 400 plus-page score to the 1925 silent film Ben Hur, Copeland
returns with a riveting multimedia experience. On a recent press stop
in New York City, he sat down with me to talk about his continuing
evolution as a musician and composer. Scroll below the video for the full interview.

How did your new score to the 1925 Ben Hur film come about?

The music started as an arena show that I composed the
music for. I ended up owning all of the music from it because the
production went bust. Later, the show was purchased by a different
impresario who’s actually still running it today, but by that time, the
music I composed and all of the copyrights had reverted back to me. I
hate to see a good tune go to waste, so I thought, “What can I do with
this?” So I thought of [organizing] a concert. Next I thought, “What
would make the concert more exciting?” And my manager Derek Power said,
“How about using the silent film?” To which I replied, “There’s a silent film?” So I looked at the special edition package of the 1959 version of Ben Hur
starring Charlton Heston, and one of the DVDs had the 1925 silent
version of the movie on it. I checked it out, and it was colossal! The
scale of it is just huge, with ships crashing into each other in
flames and thousands of Italian extras leaping to their deaths to escape
them. It was absolutely amazing, but it was two hours and 20 minutes
long. So I ripped the DVD of the silent film and imported it into Final
Cut Pro, cutting it down to 90 minutes and adding in the music I had
already written for the arena show. Then I set about getting the rights
from Warner Brothers to use that edit in our live concerts.

How long did that process take?

It took two years of working our way through the studio labyrinth to secure the rights. My manager had to basically invent
a route to connect everybody involved. After we did, we got the
80-year-old print of the film, which took two weeks to “defrost.” It
hadn’t seen the light of day since the 1960s, and it was in a format
that no longer exists, running somewhere between 18 and 22 frames per
second depending on who was cranking the machine at the time. I had to
digitize the film at 24fps, so when I got the movie back and cut it to
match my original musical cut, nothing matched. Things were running
either longer or shorter. At this point I had 410 pages of score where
every dot was matched to a frame of picture. So I had to recut every
single shot of the movie to make the music fit correctly.

Did you adjust the music or the picture to make things fit?

I adjusted both. Originally, I assembled my first “slash
cut” with orchestral music I recorded in Bratislava, overdubs in
Istanbul, plus music recorded in Dusseldorf and Los Angeles. I had
themes for particular scenes, and I tried to keep the integrity of my
original cut. But when I got the movie back, I had to re-adjust
everything so it worked and made sense.

What software did you use for composing? Score notation?

I compose in MOTU Digital Performer, but I use Avid
Sibelius to get the score ready so the musicians can read it. Sibelius
is hell to use as a composition platform. People do it, but it’s insane.
But [as a scoring platform], it’s like somebody turning on the lights.

How has your studio situation gear over the years? At one time you were composing with the Fairlight CMI.

Well, I’ve been following the technology. I started with the Fairlight and Kurzweil together, actually.

Do you still use the Fairlight?

No, but I’ve got three of them in storage!I can’t
bear to see them go, but obviously now they’re irrelevant. My
compositional career wouldn’t have happened without them, though. The
Fairlight made me as a symphonic composer possible. I used to joke, “One
day they’ll have this in my watch!” I totally got that wrong. It’s not
in my watch—it’s in my iPhone! I carried on using Kurzweils for awhile
until I started using the M-Audio ProKeys 88 to control software
instruments. I had been looking for the longest keyboard with the fewest
buttons, because I don’t need its internal sounds. The ProKeys is an
excellent machine. I also have an Akai LPK25 that I use for traveling
and to send patch changes.

What are your main instrument libraries for composing?

Vienna Symphonic Library and [the instruments included with] Sibelius. The score to Ben Hur
is huge, so I often have to work things out in General MIDI because
it’s just too large to drive other sample libraries. That’s a bit of a
drag. I know the music, so I don’t need the ear candy of huge
sample libraries all the time I’m working, but it sure would be nice to
hear it that way. There really are two completely different missions:
One is to make music sound great coming out of the speakers, and you
need something like Vienna or Hans Zimmer’s library for that. That’s
actually a relatively easy job. The other is to get the music onto the page
so that it reads well and you communicate nuances to the orchestra
musicians who will be playing it. That’s the really tricky part. It
takes ten times more effort and concentration to do that.

Where did your fascination with film scoring come from?

From a call I got from Francis Ford Coppola to score the movie Rumble Fish in 1983. That’ll do it!

It was never on your musical radar before that?

No, not really. I always had orchestral music going around
in my head, but I never really gave it much time, because it wasn’t who
I was as a performer. I listened to it, but the idea of marrying my
rock drum world with orchestral music felt pompous to me. Film composing
is what actually brought me back to the orchestra. In fact, I hold that
the film composer has the widest skill set of any musician.

Why is that?

Because the craft of film composing requires that
ultimately every form of music, ethnicity, time period, and emotional
state be represented. You have to work with every known form of not only
music, but culture as well. There’s also the specificity of it.
When somebody like [British composer] Mark Anthony Turnage writes a
concerto, he goes where his instincts take him. He’s an artist with a
capital “A,” and he never has to step outside of those instincts. But a
film composer has to go exactly to the specific emotion that each
situation requires—to happy, or sad, or happy/sad with a tinge of
whimsy, and so forth. It’s not just, “I have a nice tune and I’ll follow
it wherever it leads.” The film composer has to go to complex yet
precise emotional places constantly. So he or she learns the skill set
of how to get there, and what music takes you there.

Your scores have so many different sonic elements in them. Did you consciously study different kinds of ethnic music?

I never studied ethnic music, but I have studied
orchestration. I actually worked with a professor on it. Re-creating
different types of music seems to come instinctively to me. I majored in
music in college, but the deeper part of orchestration, as opposed to
composition, is something I have studied in depth. Understanding how to
communicate nuances in the score to the musicians playing it, and how to
balance an orchestra on the scoring stage requires you to put
those kinds of instructions on the page. I actually had a professor come
over and beat me up until I started to understand the craft. I would
write a score and he would send it back just covered in red ink. He
never suggested what I should do; he just showed me what the problems
were, and I had to figure out how to fix them on my own.

I also learned how to balance the different sections in
the orchestra by going directly to the master scores. In fact, right
under my studio desk, I have the score for Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which I pull out for reference. I’m not trying to write that piece of music per se, but I want those textures. So I’ll look and see, “Oh, he’s got the contrabassoon down there.”
I sort of have an idea of how Stravinsky builds his sound palate. But
Ravel and Debussy? With them, what sounds like just beautiful waves of
sound has all kinds of stuff going on under the hood! It’s like a
sonic wash, but it’s percussive with little grains of sand and texture
in it. And so you check the score and see exactly what’s going on.
That’s how Ravel himself learned—by studying the scores of masters.

So it’s those kinds of textures that you seek out and try to integrate into your own scores.

Exactly. I’m stealing the textures, because it’s
the only way to learn. You just don’t get enough podium time as a
composer to learn by trial and error. With rock ‘n’ roll, I can pick up a
guitar and try things out live. But I don’t get the chance to see if an
orchestral idea works without assembling an orchestra. So there’s no
way around studying the scores.

I once read an interview where you said all you needed
to compose were “ivories and faders.” Are those still your only
requirements?

Well, I also need an application. I’m a Digital Performer
guy, but I gather Logic and the rest of them all pretty much do the same
thing. By now, though, DP is basically invisible to me; my fingers just
know where to go. I also recently discovered a new application called
Streamers that lets you integrate visual cues for film scores easily. In
olden days, they would actually drill holes into the celluloid to give
the composer cues. Streamers is a modern-day version of that same
principle.

Your work crosses many artistic divides, from rock drumming and orchestral composition, to film editing and direction.Do you find it easy to pick up new creative disciplines?

I love to tinker around. I’m an app geek. Most composers
and editors who are younger than me have their own fingers on the
computer keyboard when they’re composing. It’s no big deal to them. But
no one from my generation does. They pace in the back of the room and
their workday doesn’t begin until their engineer arrives. And when the
engineer goes home, they’re done for the day. My engineer of 30 years,
Jeff Seitz, started out as a drum tech. We both learned studio
technology together and went through everything from two-inch analog
tape, Mitsubishi digital, PCM, the Fairlight, and the advent of
Mac-based sequencing and recording. But our relationship is 100 percent
social now. He’s one of my closest friends, but we don’t work together
anymore. I’m a one-man show. [Laughs.]

You don’t like having someone at the console with you while you’re composing?

I don’t need to. And he doesn’t particularly like staring at the wall!

Are any other musical projects keeping you inspired currently?

I have a series of videos up on YouTube called “Live at
the Sacred Grove,” which was inspired by the realization that when I’m
not composing for film, I still have a studio full of instruments and a
trunk full of microphones. So I wired my studio up and miked up all the
drums, amplifiers, the Hammond organ and Leslie speaker, everything!
Every square foot of my studio is wired up and close-miked. Plus, I have
six cameras with six hours of memory in each of them. So the whole
studio is ready to rock.

I invite my friends over and I tell them the cameras are
on. There’s no camera operator or sound engineer—we’re just drinking
tequila and doing what musicians do. We have parties and we jam. There’s
no “Can you give me a level?” kind of studio experience. It’s all
music. So for instance, the guys from Pearl Jam come over to the Sacred
Grove. We play all night and then they leave. But I recorded everything!

So what are you doing with the material?

Well, I can hand the musicians other instruments while
we’re listening to the playback of what we just jammed to. So, for
example, we’ll overdub ideas for brass parts, singing them through the
mouthpiece and just having fun. Then they leave and I can “Foley in”
those parts. I can loop a particular part in Digital Performer until I
find what I’m looking for, and then I cut up the 15-minute jam down to
seven minutes and I start overdubbing different parts, like Tower of
Power-style horns, for example. I’ve had Tommy Lang, Ben Harper, Stanley
Clarke, Jeff Lynne, Snoop Dogg, Taylor Hawkins, Neil Peart, Matt Stone,
and many others. It’s not only about the live jams, it’s about the
inception of an idea. They’re literally making it up while they’re
there. It’s like [Daryl Hall’s TV show] Live From Daryl’s House, but different, because these musicians aren’t promoting their new song or new album. It’s just for having fun.

Are there any plans for the videos besides just letting them be seen?

No. I put them up for all to enjoy. I’d love to make an
album from those sessions—not for commercial exploitation, but just so
people can listen to it in their cars.

As a guy who has worked in seemingly every area of the musical arts, what keeps you hungry and motivated?

Well, I do like “the big mission.” With my 60 years of
making music, I feel that it’s my responsibility to what I’ve learned to
keep challenging myself and go to places that only a person finally
equipped with my experiences can go. I like making these Sacred Grove
videos because they’re fun. They’re free. I do them to give back. I feel
that I’ve been amply rewarded for my music. Not only have I paid my
dues, I’ve earned my due. I really feel that way, and I have no desire
to extract more money out of my fans. All I want is for them to enjoy my
music. That’s why I do things and why I’m talking to you. I just want
more people to hear it.

What advice do you have for aspiring film composers today?

I would tell them to “eat their vegetables,” meaning study
your orchestration, because that’s the one skill that the kid next to
you with his laptop and his copy of Reason can’t compete with. Learn
about the general theory and use of the orchestra, because the biggest
composers working today know it. No one is going to steal James Horner’s
job, but the average electronic composer has to be scared for his or
her job these days. So know your orchestration!

Inside the Sacred Grove

Copeland’s studio is both film composing crucible and
space for recording impromptu jams with fellow accomplished musicians.
Here’s the essential gear that makes it tick, in Copeland’s own words.